"There are ways to reclaim our sovereignty, to become more than just
consumers, by reconfiguring the food system and rewriting the
relations of power that exploit both people and earth in the growing and eating of food."
-Raj Patel

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

You are receiving this email from me because you have donated to Tim DeChristopher's Legal Defense Fund in the past. I want to ask you to help us stand in solidarity with Tim once again by participating in Peaceful Uprising's National Call to Action. On March 9th, Tim DeChristopher was summarily moved to isolated confinement, we are asking all of Tim's supporters to take a few minutes and make calls to FCI Herlong, Bureau of Prisons office in DC and various Congressmen that sit on the subcommittee that oversees the BOP demanding that Tim be moved back to the minimum security camp from which he came. Below is an email you can forward onto your friends, and you can find the full story and call to action details here.

Monday, March 26, 2012

We’ve been doing this a long time – this farming thing – and still there isn’t a single part of it that gets old. I keep thinking that I’ve accumulated enough experience to know what to expect from one year to the next, but I’m always hit with the reality of a new spring. As exceptional as this early season is, every year there is a morning that I wake up thinking I know exactly what I’ll be doing to orchestrate the perfect growing conditions for the next nine months. By the time the day is over I’ve reverted to an infantile state that makes me wonder if I’ve learned anything from the previous 30 years. Of course, I must have figured some things out because I’m still here. Normally when someone asks me advice about farming my mind goes blank, my eyes glaze over and I have the overwhelming urge to cluck like a chicken. For most people this is enough; they throw me a little scratch and go on their merry way as if they’d just consulted the Oracle at Delphi. The general population is better off not knowing what it takes to stay in this business. It’s like knowing that quantum physics has some very practical applications but who really needs it on a clear night as we enjoy watching the universe expand before our very eyes. If there is a secret to being successful as farmer, it’s probably in the planning process; and there are as many methods as there are farmers. Ours is simple and informal. Every Friday night we sit down to eat pizza and have a few beers and fantasize about what sort of Eden we can create for ourselves. By the time we retire we have not only solved most of the world’s most dire problems, we have also come up with some really great projects that are totally out of our economic reach. Incredibly we have made most of those fantasies come true – with the exception of world peace, of course. Who’s going to take a clucking farmer seriously anyway.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

DESCRIBING THE UNITED STATES of the 1830s in his now-famous work, Democracy in America, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville depicted a country passionate about self-governance. In the fifty years since sovereignty had passed from the crown to the people, citizens of the new republic had seized upon every opportunity “to take a hand in the government of society and to talk about it….If an American should be reduced to occupying himself with his own affairs,” wrote de Tocqueville, “half his existence would be snatched from him; he would feel it as a vast void in his life.”

At the center of this vibrant society was the town or county government. “Without local institutions,” de Tocqueville believed, “a nation has not got the spirit of liberty,” and might easily fall victim to “despotic tendencies.”

S.F.I. Goals and Purposes:

If “we are what we eat,” we would like to know what it is that we “are.”

The Student Food Initiative (SFI) is a collective of students at Juniata College who--through assorted opinions and tactics--collaborate out of an interest and concern for the state and future of our current food system.